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Chinese Court Sentences American Publisher to Prison

HONG KONG — A Chinese court has sentenced an American citizen to more than five years in prison for selling magazines about Chinese politics, in a case that bears striking similarities to Beijing’s recent, widely denounced detentions of five Hong Kong-based booksellers.

Like the booksellers, the American, James J. Wang, who was sentenced on Tuesday in the southern city of Shenzhen, published gossipy material about political intrigue in mainland China. Mr. Wang, a naturalized American whose Chinese name is Wang Jianmin, was also based in Hong Kong, and was accused of running an illegal business.

He and a colleague, Guo Zhongxiao, who was also sentenced to prison on Tuesday, published and edited two magazines in Hong Kong — Multiple Face and New-Way Monthly — that featured loosely sourced articles about Chinese political leaders, including President Xi Jinping. Mr. Wang and Mr. Guo have been detained since their arrests in May 2014 in Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, and both pleaded guilty to the charges in November.

In Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese city that has its own legal system and civil liberties unknown on the mainland under an arrangement called “one country, two systems,” there is nothing illegal about publishing such material. But the Chinese authorities’ case appeared to center on the fact that some of the magazines were sold in mainland China, and that Mr. Wang had been in China at the time of his arrest, giving them jurisdiction.

John Kirby, a spokesman for the State Department, said the United States had asked Chinese officials “repeatedly” since Mr. Wang’s arrest more than two years ago for permission to visit him and to attend his trial.

“Those requests have been denied,” Mr. Kirby told reporters in Washington on Wednesday at a regular briefing. “We will continue to request access to Mr. Wang, so that we may provide appropriate consular services.”

A spokesman at the United States Embassy in Beijing did not comment on Mr. Wang’s sentencing, referring questions to the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs in Washington. The bureau did not respond to an email and telephone message sent on Tuesday.

Photo

A photograph of James J. Wang from his United States passport. He has been detained by the Chinese authorities since his arrest in May 2014 in Shenzhen.

Mr. Wang’s access to United States consular officials during his incarceration may have been hampered by the nature of his entry into China. His lawyer, Chen Nansha, said he had entered mainland China from Hong Kong using locally issued travel documents, not his American passport.

Americans who do not use their passports to enter China generally cannot obtain consular protection there, according to the State Department’s website.

Mr. Wang, whose American passport indicates that he is 62, was sentenced to five years and three months in prison for “illegal business operations,” as well as related charges of bribery and bid-rigging, and was fined about $30,000, according to an announcement by the court in Shenzhen. Mr. Guo was sentenced to two years and three months and fined about $7,500. Mr. Wang was the magazines’ publisher, and Mr. Guo was their editor in chief.

Mr. Chen, the lawyer, said he had argued in court that Mr. Wang’s sentence was excessive according to Chinese law, given that relatively few of the magazines had been shipped to the mainland and sold there. Court documents show that the two magazines had combined gross sales of about $1 million from September 2012 through April 2014.

Of that amount, less than $10,000 could be attributed to sales in China, a sum that under law should not lead to prosecution, Mr. Chen said by telephone from Shenzhen. But officials used the Hong Kong sales figures to determine the sentence, he said.

“His magazines were published in Hong Kong, and most were sold in Hong Kong, and based on ‘one country, two systems,’ Hong Kong should be considered outside the Chinese mainland,” Mr. Chen said.

Mr. Chen also said that the charge of bribery was unfounded, saying that it stemmed from the payment of a modest salary to an employee. The bid-rigging charge involved winning a contract to write a market research report for a state-owned oil company.

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Maya Wang, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch who is not related to Mr. Wang, urged the United States to speak out about his case, saying that the nature of his entry into China should not prevent Washington from doing so.

Silence on the issue, she said, would only embolden Beijing to take more such actions against ethnic Chinese people who hold foreign passports. China has an expansive definition of who it considers citizens, often encompassing people like Mr. Wang, who was born in China.

“The American government, or any government, really shouldn’t buy into this narrative,” she said.

China’s detention of the Hong Kong booksellers, which drew international attention and contributed to fears that the city’s freedoms are eroding, also involved foreign passport holders. One of the five booksellers, Lee Bo, who disappeared from Hong Kong in December before surfacing in Chinese custody, is a British citizen, and another, Gui Minhai, who vanished from Thailand, is Swedish.

There are signs that the Chinese authorities have taken a strong interest in the case of Mr. Wang and Mr. Guo. One is the number of other people who have been convicted in the case, including Mr. Wang’s wife, Xu Zhongyun, and an editor, Liu Haitao, both of whom received prison sentences on Tuesday but are free on probation. Another employee, Luo Sha, was tried separately in November on the bribery and bid-rigging charges.

Another possible sign of official interest in the case is the frequency with which defense lawyers have been replaced. Mr. Chen is at least the fourth lawyer to represent Mr. Wang since his arrest. His original lawyer, Chen Youxi, was removed from the case by Chinese officials, said a subsequent defense lawyer, Zhou Kui. Another, Li Fangping, said that he, too, had been removed at the request of Shenzhen prosecutors.

Colleagues of Mr. Wang say they suspect that one or more of the articles he published about Mr. Xi and other top leaders — at his two magazines and during an earlier tenure at Yazhou Zhoukan, another Hong Kong–based publication focused on Chinese politics — had prompted the apparent official interest in his case.

There appears to be considerable precedent for that. Like Mr. Wang, the five Hong Kong booksellers had published gossipy material about top leaders including Mr. Xi, and his wife. Another book publisher, Yiu Mantin, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2014, for smuggling industrial chemicals, just as he was preparing to publish a book critical of Mr. Xi.

A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2016, on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: China Sentences an American Publisher of Political Articles to Prison. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe